Recently, a Viewlet author asked, "I'm working with ViewletCam2 and want to hide the cursor in part of my Viewlet. Is there a way to do this?" Well, ViewletCam2 does not have a feature to do this, but there is a creative solution to achieve the same effect on playback with just a little work and some tweaking. So, here are some steps to follow if you want to achieve this same effect in your ViewletCam2 Viewlets.

Note: These are for achieving the effect at either the start or end of a Viewlet. If you want to do this in the middle of a project, you will have to split / merge your project a few times to get it to work, but I'll leave that part up to you.

Basic steps to create the illusion of the cursor (mouse) "hiding" during the movie:

1. Create a test file with simple cursor movement in it.2. At some point, split the movie (Tools > Split Movie) and save either the "Former" or "Latter".3. Save / Close the files.4. Open the newly split and saved movie ONLY in ViewletCam2.5. Deselect the Mouse Layer and save the file.6. Close the file.7. Reopen the original file and move to either the first frame or the last frame (depending on where you want to "merge" the other file into this file).8. Select "Tools > Merge Movie" and merge the other file into this one.

Now, these next steps may seem a bit confusing, so take your time here.

9. Select the Mouse Layer.10. Right click on the Mouse Layer and select "Properties".11. In the "Pointers" tab, you will see a list of cursors on the left. There should be at least two of them and there may be duplicates (actually they aren't duplicates, they just represent the same "type" of cursors from both files).12. Select the last one in the list (this would be the cursor from the file you merged INTO this file).

Note: for the next section, (to this post) I have attached a PNG (invisible.png) file for you to use as a "replacement cursor" image.

13. Click the "Browse" button and select the "invisible.png" file (this is a totally transparent png file that you are going to use to "fool" ViewletCam2 into thinking you are loading a "visible" cursor image to use as a replace...see where we're going with this?).14. Click the "Add" button.15. It may seem nothing happened, but it did. Scroll down the "Customize" preview list where you see all the replacement images. At the bottom of this list will appear to be a big "white" space. This is actually the transparent "invisible.png" file. Select that white space and it should look like something is selected (just a gray empty area).16. The "Replace" button to the left of this list should now be available. Click the "Replace" button.17. Now, click "OK".

If succcessful, when you preview the slides that had the cursor you wanted to hide, these will still show a cursor path with red dots, but no cursor will be visible because you have applied the transparent image. On playback, the cursor will "disappear".

Play with a test file until you get comfortable with these steps. Tweak as needed.

To get the image file, you can download the ZIP and extract the PNG from it. Or, right click on the PNG and select "Save Picture As" and save it to your system. Keep in mind this is a totally transparent image file.